PeepTV.ca

Diane: A Perfect Storm

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 14:33:13 -0700

(12:00)
Theodor Adorno writes: “Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they resist.

Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touched them as familiar.

Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.”

from: Minima Moralia 1951 p.101

The PVR set-top box I purchased from my satellite TV provider screwed up some how. I simply could not stop it from recording ABC World News with Diane Sawyer. Every week night --religiously-- it archived this newscast until the entire 80GB hard drive was completely full. And still it continued, automatically deleting the oldest episode in order to fit in the most recent recording. This mechanical reproduction continued for months on end. I tried to ignore it.
While I do watch most every kind of newscast available on a daily basis, I focus mainly on three U.S. 24hour cable TV news providers. But here in my PVR sat a valuable archival data base. So during the holidays I decided to watch every recording. It was a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the vaguely solipsistic and fatalistic “journalism” of Diane Sawyer.
Of course it should be no surprise that TV news no longer intends to inform. Purposefully, network news is only to (for) show, and it must do so with little else but emotive utterances from its presenters. A news anchor’s presence is impeccably crafted, honed (styled and lit) to emit empathetic delivery necessary for continuous reception. Sawyer’s sole purpose is to glow with impassioned resignation. It is “commerce”.
And so, one begins to understand why Diane Sawyer can regularly pronounce dire updates of global catastrophe and still so few of us bother to understand or care...including Diane herself. For it matters not whether the end of world is or is not near. Diane will never communicate any understanding inherent in the meanings of “end” or “world” or “near”. She will only show and sigh...again and again. And we viewers insist upon this, upon seeing everything in abbreviated, explicit, close-up “suspension”.
This is the very purpose, I suppose, of invoking combinations of ethnography and critical theory. They are tools, tactics, I use for identifying media exploitation directly from my home TV. But here I’m not inferring the usual parodic three B’s (blood, breasts, and beasts) found throughout most corporatized media (although this is also a staple in TV news). The stakes focused here are climatic global destruction. Real data mounts every day, yet nothing changes. It is because this explicit imagery, nullified within most all TV production, is immediately rendered into “vague expression”. This daily data-drip of horrors invokes in us little but the “suspension of all received opinions” -- irrespective of topic.
We watch Diane’s repetitious images and yawn. We disregard their consequences and wait for commercial. We eagerly fear the future on every channel, searching for photos we’ve published of our own impending death, then shrug off every spectacular shock. It is the TV recipe of abstracted denial. That is unless you feel victimized, then you wonder why it isn’t everyone’s top priority. While I might find personal enlightenment through Adorno’s critical theory of negative dialectics, it is clear few others do...or care. For as Adorno reminds, “unequivocal comprehension” is long gone. It has been systematically “deliberately disencouraged”.
Over the course of two weeks, I chronologically examined some seventy five episodes of ABC News --back-to-back-- decontextualized from their daily broadcast environment. This is not the optimal approach to (critical) media ethnography, but it cleaned out my PVR. From it all, I gleaned some 500 hundred individual “apocalyptic” clips around this topic alone. That’s right, this video could have easily been triple-length. But why bother? We viewers resist “conceptual effort”. We require endless unrequited dénouement.
News providers do indeed show us news, but they are “traitors to what they communicate” -- doomed inside their own perfect media storm. Diane showed me so. But it is critical ethnography that reveals to me why.

“Self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
Walter Benjamin (1936)

“2012 was the hottest year in the United States...and hotter not by
a little but by a landslide.” Diane Sawyer (8Jan13)

“About the last thing we needed to hear, but it’s news because of
that.” Brian Williams (8Jan13)

“They’ve never seen anything like it.” Scott Pelley (8Jane13)

“Right now it just seems overwhelming.” Chad Meyers (9Jan13)

For more weather mediaturgy...click HERE... or HERE.

Détournement: Next Generation

Thu, 6 Dec 2012 21:04:10 -0700

(7:30)
Guy Debord writes: “The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even in the worst films...

“It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war... But most films only merit being cut up to compose other works...
“In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life. Gestures and words can be given other meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical reasons...
“The need for a secret language, for passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite...
“Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations — the ultimate goal of all our activity — everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them...
“The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize.
In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the pre-situationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.
We will postpone the development of these theses until later.”

from: Guy Debord, A User’s Guide to Detournement 1956

Guy Debord was loosely regarded as the theoretical leader of Situationist International. Like the Surrealists and Dadaists before it, SI was comprised primarily of male artists. They were weirdly exclusive, elitist, egoist, educated. They considered themselves avant-garde. Their ‘situations’ were intentional expressions for turning the capitalist system against itself -- employing pranks, punks and jammings -- which counter-attacked capitalism’s degradation of all people within its sphere.
The Situationists believed that as our technologies inexorably advanced the ‘ends of work’ fail, increasingly blocking happiness and freedom. In its place, mass-production becomes ‘spectacle’, the concrete manufacture of alienation. As one might expect, their antics barely caught the public’s interest.
While the potentials in conflating media practice with political theory and revolutionary perspective deeply appeal to me and my PeepTV.ca projects, my general purpose is markedly more modest than those espoused by the Situationists. For I do not wish to change the world, rather I have my hands full trying to wrap my own head around the few common media I daily observe. Instead, I’m trying to change my world. “And maybe with the next generation it will be different.”
And so, when I heard former Senator Trent Lott (R:MS) just this week on TV blame “the airplane” for the communicational gridlock on capital hill, I took notice and went to work. For the claim is as absurdist as any created by the Situationists. It is a claim which should be resharpen for stabbing back. To help flint-knap my own counter-attack, I used ambient audio, random-extant early-1960’s footage, and The Lawrence Welk Show. I cut them into parts and refunctioned the bits along with Lott’s voice... to sublate and transcend. It is a positive barbarism of “new bad things” against “good old things”.
Of course, in a curious twist, Trent Lott’s airplanes can be theorized as mass communication (Innis), but to wistfully moon about some “next generation” fix is both cruel and ludicrous. Lott’s generation danced itself blissfully through the very historical raprture of mass-communicational evolution. So is today’s generation, and so will the next one. Better, maybe, to stick to my knitting here and refunction my screen for my own private (r)evolution... in quiet dedication to so many early Situationist International films (1973).
"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."

This video is simply another in my own ‘next-generation’ advancement. To both Benjamin and Adorno, it would be considered Aufhebung, in all three senses of the word -- preserving, negation, going beyond. Brecht and Baudrillard would most likely find this ultradétournement video much too ‘hypnotic’. While Eisenstein, on the other hand, would undoubtedly re-sketch something more formalist still, while washing down his bloody steak and meat soup with two cups of cocoa and two French rolls.

The Money Shot

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 14:41:27 -0600

(5:15)
All 24hour cable TV newsmakers eagerly provide the prurient Money Shot because it is the most profitable kind of seductive banality possible during around-the-clock production. Indeed, the Money Shot is a key to profit because it extends viewer arousal. And better still, very little production expense is necessary to produce a mesmerotic Money Shot, because somewhere inside most every LIVE event lurks the prospect of “snuff-sex”. In short, just add flirtatious narration over most any unfolding LIVE action... and Voilà. It is the best and cheapest tactic for guaranteeing ratings.

Money Shots within snuff-sex are the best kind of TV news because each titillates its audience ad infinitum, making it almost impossible for us to stop watching. Each conflates every forbidden death desire with every forbidden voyeuristic eroticism. To help signal each eroticism, FOX News’ designers brand their screens with the word “URGENT”, announcing in no uncertain terms that we are presently floating in priceless liminality just prior to ejaculation.

Newsmakers and audiences alike understand that when broadcasting snuff-sex, a Money Shot’s promissory implosion a priori to extermination or annihilation creates the lubricating pre-cum necessary to keep every viewer eyeball glued to the screen. We all know this is the cheap good stuff, and so we always demand a lot of it.

To help clarify this somewhat paradoxical news methodology, consider that the true sin in publishing Kate Middleton’s nipples was that the ‘forbidden’ images were so grainy from being photographed from far away with a long camera lens. And now that the ‘kat’ is out of the bag, all that remains for a public to fantasize are higher resolution images of those same little royal brown spots. After all, tricking the duchess into an “URGENT” pussy-photo now would be a real long shot, wouldn’t it?

And also consider that the true production blasphemy, at least in the U.S., over the recent controversial anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims resides in this video’s shabby writing and production style, which falls flat upon sophisticated North American media eyes and ears. This clumsy video apparently eroticizes marginalized cultures, but certainly not ours! What a fumbling waste of a perfectly effective snuff-sex Money Shot.

Implicit to a Money Shot, its tele-genital LIVE-action explicitness must never be allowed to fully conclude on screen, because it is foreplay which relentlessly grabs and holds TV viewers in lubricated mesmerotic paroxysm, while climax terminates foreplay and interrupts TV’s most profitable quivering. For example, with 24hour news, political editorializing always trumps political election in exactly the same way ass-licking always trumps a sperm-facial, because -- although both can easily be produced to shock -- foreplay clearly holds viewer interest easier and longer than a climax. A true Money Shot keeps making money.

Here we discover a critical difference between TV news and most other forms of media production. A climax for most media makers symbolizes “culmination”. However, a climax for TV news symbolizes “termination”. A car chase is better snuff-sex news than an execution. To mishandle a Money Shot is to badly bungle a core premise of profitability in TV news production: “Keep stroking the lead story. Keep the viewers in their seats. Keep the cameras rolling.” Hegemonically, we expect mesmerotic production perfection from our newsmakers. It is why we so greedy consume the greedy products we so greedily make for our greedy selves...

And so, last week, FOX News employees greedily broadcast yet another promiscuous, in-progress car chase Money Shot. It is a “greedy” car chase because it is that kind of news which stimulates its audience into non-stop convulsion, into involuntary ripples of private arousal so perfectly suited to every available screen. But then... the FOX News on-air team uncharacteristically screwed it all up. Their exclusive broadcast came to a breathtaking conclusion and the true Money Shot was suddenly terminated. They allowed us to see the protagonist shoot himself in the head with his own gun. We saw it clearly through a local-affiliate helicopter’s surveilling telescopic robo-camera.

By NOT cutting away (or more accurately, by not cutting off), the Money Shot comes to problematic fruition and our genitalia cease their involuntary contractions... no matter how hard we rub. This perfectly profitable news story ended in a crumpled heap of flaccid apology. What? Where were the product placements and the lead-ins to the next mesmerotic spooge-fest? We can’t maintain our voyeuristic erections without continuous dosings of ‘journalistic viagra’.

True newsmaking transgression here was not simply that FOX News personnel aired the story to conclusion... but rather in airing this conclusion, it interrupted our absorption so abruptly we orgasmed incorrectly, newsmaker and viewer alike. Good spunk fell to the ground like good seed upon rock. For the actual Money Shot was in prolonging the eroticized chase scene, not in airing the suicide. Once this man falls dead to the ground -- whether our ejaculates subside or disperse -- we swiftly drift into sad wisps of directionless melancholy. Our shudders of eroticism, obsession and dependency fall silently short, unfulfilled. And we momentarily awaken... only to find ourselves turning the TV channel in hopes of masturbating to yet another promise of “URGENT” close-up snuff-sex. And, of course, allowing the viewer a reason to change channels is the most egregious production sin known to 24hour news.

Shepard Smith’s brief self-interested apology for wasting perfectly good viewer jizm over a botched Money Shot is the least we can expect from FOX newsmakers in this situation, I suppose:

"And we really messed up. And we're all very sorry. That
didn't belong on TV. We took every precaution we knew
how to take to keep that from being on TV. And I personally
apologize to you that happened. Sometimes we see a lot
of things we don't let get to you because it is not time
appropriate, it is insensitive, it is just wrong. And that was
wrong. And that won't happen again on my watch. And I'm
sorry. We will update you on what happened with that guy
and how that went down tonight on the Fox Report.
I'm sorry."

But then, why offer an apology at all? Any offending image will simply be re-shown over and over anyway.

FOX News’ seminal event was barely mentioned by anyone ever again. Most likely because many more snuff-sex Money Shots are right around the corner from every 24hour news provider... and we can’t wait to jerk-off to each one.

“...The most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media... (while) the entire universe unfolds unnecessarily on your home screen. This is a microscopic pornography, pornographic because it is forced, exaggerated, just like the close-up of sexual acts in a porno film. All this destroys the stage, once preserved through a minimal distance and which was based on a secret ritual known only to its actors. ...Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And ecstasy is obscene.”

from: Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication 1987 p.20-22

“...At a time when television and the media are increasingly unable to give an account of the world's (unbearable) events, they have discovered daily life and existential banality as the most deadly event, the most violent news, the very scene of the perfect crime. And indeed it is. People are fascinated, fascinated and terrified by the indifference of the Nothing-to-say, Nothing-to-do, by the indifference of their very existence.”

from: Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art 2005 p.182

The Cathodic Scry of Narcissus

Sat, 9 Jun 2012 10:10:34 -0600

(19:00)
"For Walter Benjamin, the modus operandi of the baroque was one of invention, of accumulating fragments ‘without any strict idea of a goal’ and hoping for a ‘miracle’ to occur in their arrangement. Haphazardly collecting, the allegorist acts in faith as she or he arranges the pieces. Accumulation and arrangement are the two key processes of baroque allegory pointed out for Benjamin, [where] the allegorist functions somewhat as an ‘editor’ rather than an author...(p.68).

"The way to invent is to accumulate and arrange, or, to put it in already rehearsed terms, to select and arrange the actions of metaphor and metonymy, respectively.... In Benjamin's writings, allegory becomes a precursor to artistic practices with which he would later engage, practices such as surrealism, Brechtian theatre, Proust's memory writings, and Eisenstein's filmic montage (p.68).

"The melancholic gaze for Benjamin, however, does not wish for the whole structure again but productively rummages through the ruins, lighting upon lost objects that the unifying narratives of history have forgotten....(p.68). By creating a new lamentation, the allegorist, who is also finally the poet, the inventor, or possibly the editor, attempts to open a space for redemption, even if it is unclear whether such a once-and-for-all redemption will come (p.70).

"So Benjamin never throws anything away, never clears forests and leaves it without remainder. He is a collector after all and he takes objects and ideas from the past, such as myth or allegory, and shines new light on them in the present. Thus, ultimately, by striking a difference, he can then turn around and create a montage between the ideas, lighting up previously unknown, concealed secrets about the ways rationality is mythical and myth rational (p.79).

"The mythographer, for Benjamin, is an allegorist who reads culture, but instead of looking for symbols with their conventional meanings, as many anthropologists do, the allegorist looks for cultural allegories, those mutated symbols that unravel the presumed unity of religions and culture. The difference between the cultural observer who reads symbols and the one who reads allegories is brought forth in the classic Marxian analysis, according to which philosophers have only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to change it (p.79). [Hence] it is not the masterpieces we should be looking for, but the mundane, the overlooked (p.80)."

from: S. Brent Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics 2005

Our mesmerizing screens (cathode ray Adderall?) are but our most recent devices in the ancient lineage of allegorical divination. Upon the watery black surfaces of our screens, fragmented images are accumulated and arranged into soothing siren songs of trance-like code, reflecting our desire to redeem and embody every seductive apparition of us. For our digital realities are but quotidian computational inventions of mutated perfection, conjured real through induced conscious-dreaming expressed in Kabbalistic zeros and ones. And when our crystal-ball (smoke) screens begin to mirror all we super-naturally request, who can resist ‘seeing’ these magical illuminations as profane auras to our own narcissism?

Walter Benjamin, as with fellow surrealists, similarly employed narcotizing methods of spiritual meditation equal to today’s screens -- for instance scrying and hashish -- to induce secret states of melancholic reflection and mystical allegory:

"What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time:
the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.
To follow with the eye - while resting on a summer afternoon -
a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its
shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those
mountains, of that branch.”

...As with Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, Brecht’s Epic Thaetre, Eisenstein’s Film Theory, McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride, the surrealists’ agenda, and the entire critical media ethnography project -- the modus operandi for PeepTV.ca also converges through auratic fragmentation, from fragmentation, within methodologies of montage. It is to invent from chance-like observation, not merely towards interpretation but to elicit change in the world.

Indeed, our computer technologies today are the precise holders, interpreters, creators and editors of most every contemporary myth. But to what affect? I cannot tell in ‘truth’, but I can show in ‘difference’ through an imprecise montage of their mutated symbolic ruins. These PeepTV videos are “the theatre," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas.” So, who knows? ....maybe something can be divined after all.

“Relax... Deeper... Deeper”

Falling

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:22:00 -0600

(9:00)
Amelia Jones: “...interpretation needs to be recognized as much more dynamic and contingent. It does not come ‘naturally’ at the moment of contact with the artwork, but is worked out as an on-going, open performance between artist and spectators, with meaning circulating fluidly in the complex web of connections among artists, patrons, collectors, and between both specialized and non-specialized viewers within the arena of encounter.

Since meaning is negotiated between and across subjects and through language, it can never be fully secured: meaning comes to be understood as a negotiated domain, in flux and contingent on social and personal investments and contexts. By emphasizing this lack of fixity and shifting invested nature of any interpretative engagement, we wish to assert that interpretation itself is worked out as a performance between artists and spectators.

What needs to be realized is that such assertions of authenticity ultimately provide an interpretation that constitutes just one reading among many others.”

from: Preforming the Body: Preforming the Text 1999 p: Introduction

...it has been two long months since I last made a video. During this seclusion, my mother-in-law died from protracted medical issues. She was deeply loved as matriarch of the family. Coincidentally, during this time, I experienced my own scuffle with our industrialized medical system. Neither of these events were pretty or natural... rather, as this video invokes, the last two months were grotesque and super-natural. And so, these events lead me toward another kind of contemplation, that of my own inevitable dreamlike life-media performance.
The imagery here was appropriated from YouTube’s vast repository of banal obscenity. The audio comes from Delia Derbyshire (1964). She is a pioneer in early British synthetic audio production. Allegorically performed together, through intellectual montage, these two artifacts now viscerally conflate into a personal representation of my own weightless bodily rapture.

Mass Ornament

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 13:21:26 -0700

(9:30)
In Siegfried Kracauer’s, The Mass Ornament (1927), one subject of his essay is a precision-trained company of dancers created in the 1880s by a British businessman and producer of church pageants, Arthur Tiller.

   The “Tiller Girls”, exported to the United States and then to the continent, were all the rage in Berlin by the 1920’s. Yet Kracauer senses that the form of escapism embodied by the Tiller Girls is less exotic than it appears. In the dancers’ geometrically regulated and synchronized patterns of movement, he discovers “the possibility of an aesthetic relation to organized toil.” “The legs of the Tiller Girls correspond to the hands in the factory,” he writes. They are “the aesthetic reflex of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system.”

   Although the girls’ scantily clad bodies partake of the imagery of fantasy and sexual desire, they are bereft of eroticism, indeed grotesque. The spectacular choreography fragments them into “indissoluble girl clusters” composed of “arms, thighs, and other segments.” Like the Ford automobile factory assembly line, in which “[e]veryone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality”, the chorus line transforms the dancers into cogs in a suprapersonal, paramilitary machine. Dance is reduced to a mere “marking of time.”

   Likewise, the spectators at these events, “arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier,” themselves become absorbed into the mass ornament -- mesmerized voyeurs of a mirror image, a spatial hieroglyph, of their own condition. And yet, states Kracauer paradoxically (and this is the crux), the aesthetic pleasure derived from these mass spectacles is “legitimate.”

   Over time, however, Kracauer’s view of things becomes increasingly somber. In a 1931 essay entitled Girls and Crisis where he revisits his allegory of the female chorus line (it is the Alfred Jackson Girls this time, not the Tiller troupe) whom Kracauer describes as making up a thirty-two-leg “girl-machine” and striking poses that evoke the regularity of the pistons of an engine. But as the assembly line and the chorus line progress into bread lines, the girls now appear “ghostly” and out of date. “They come as a procession of phantoms out of a dead past.”

   For Kracauer, the fascist spectacle was more than just an aestheticized representation of Nazi ideology; it was an efficacious instrument for channeling bodies and deep-rooted desires “into a monumental system of dams.” And again, by 1947 in From Caligari to Hitler, Kracauer attributes purely negative and totalitarian connotations to the mass ornament: “bastard reality” and “a frightening spectacle”.



   ... It was amongst and through these cultural synchronizations during Kracauer’s time (World War I, Fordism, Taylorism, Busby Berkeley, Nazism, etc.) that the idea of surrealism gained its intellectual currency as a viable political provocation: that is to say, as a counter-response... a counter-step... against the grain of a fearful implosion into the black hole of non-differentiation, mechanical cynicism, and human ‘thingness’. Surrealism was invoked as a controversial political re-action towards a growing, anesthetized public-- not simply as an adjective denoting ‘weird unbelievability’ as the term is so often mis-used today.

   Likewise in today’s world of group-aggrandizement, choreographed conformity, Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, global television, and a host of other obligatory mass ornament; we devalue and mis-recognize attempts at genuine counter-response. And this results in our under-valuing the lonely singular, the un-fundable different, the un-promoted independent, even public critical provocateurs... not to mention under-valuing ethnographic surrealism as a means of philosophic methodology.

   Within our growing valorization of social organization, fandom, ‘friends’, crowds, flash mobs, campaigns, etc.; we too find ourselves in viral monumental systems not unlike Kracauer did during his time. Hence, as experienced daily throughout our own infectious (fascist?) cultural-technological-spectacular synchronizations, I posit Kracauer’s sentiments hold true. Mass Ornament is socially instinctual and often an expression of escapism first, but we must always remember that it also carries potential to turn dangerous fast. For social synchronization can sometimes lead to lock-step, and then to goose-step, where everything out-of-step gets marginalized and eventually edited from ‘picture perfect’.

   I could easily have made this simple video 10x longer with hours of clips of ethnographic data in my TV archives alone. But 9:30 is plenty to write this story, don’t you think?

Sleep - Faith - Together
Pictures - I'm naked
Black - Dirty - Puzzle
Leaves - Skin - Gravel
Sex - Food - Happy - Good

Twenty - Minutes - Maybe - More
Soap - Eyes - Tears
Stretch - Orange - Love - Love

Voice - Mouth - Camera - Fog
White - Noise - Pictures of stars
Totally - Remote - Strangers

Real - Maybe - The earth
Now - Now

Rush - Look - Down
Itch - Bad
Lick - God - Nothing
TV - Blow - Dog - Bye
Heavy - Little - Lights


This project is dedicated to Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949-2011).

Social Privy

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:31:47 -0700

(21:30)
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) is, for Michel Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate “cells”) and each inmate is always visible to a monitor situated in a central tower. Monitors will not in fact always see each inmate; the point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring of those controlled than by heavy physical constraints.
The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; vision becomes a trap. Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. The inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.
The principle of the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a school, a street, a screen). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to build it, its principle has come to pervade every aspect of modern society. The Panopticon is the instrument through which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation. It presents a cruel and ingenious cage.

... Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was written in 1975. Much has changed since. Where Foucault suggested possibilities of resistance to surveilling authoritarianism, today we discover we are all happily both inmate and monitor -- the watched and the watcher. For the ‘eye of power’ lurks in every camera/screen/gun technology, and no one carries an empty holster.
And so I made this video essay into 20mins of cacophony (sous ratour over linear montage), since my concern here is not that we are all unwittingly constructing our own surveillances, or that we should fear its consequences, or that we need to be better informed of privacy dangers, etc., because this incessant media chatter has another quite specific purpose: The horror of ubiquitous surveillance also lays in its protection. For the constant reminder that we have controls against surveillance is also enough to invoke forms of profound social passivity (at least for now perhaps).
In my ethnographic archives I discovered I had collected hundreds of oddly quite similar media clips regarding surveillance and social privacy, each essentially saying the same thing in almost exactly the same way: “Privacy is being badly breached... but here are some ways to help protect yourself.” But if this topic is so important and receives such repetitive TV air-play, why then do we find the problems of privacy deepening? Isn’t more news coverage concerning privacy settings useful enough to viewers to thwart the surveillance tactics inside our ubiquitous technologies?
No. The endless cacophony over privacy, for and against, importantly is but another kind of parallel surveillance tactic, a tandem social control inside our ‘inspection house’. Indeed, we will continue to hear still more privacy-concern cacophony, exactly as we happily employ still more technologies to supersede privacy faster. And we will all happily continue to surveil each other like hegemonically slaughtered lambs regardless of ever-impotent privacy settings firewalls.
After all, WE (not Google, Facebook, CNN, the police, etc., but we so-called citizens often working at these surveilling corporations) are the ones who create obscene spyware, as well as each ominously concerned news reports. We do this expressly to spy upon each other. We make these technologies, we write the codes and the stories. We sell them, we use them, we love them, we profit from them, and we fear them. And again, we do so by our own social(?) design, but of course never quite enough to make each other stop using them all.
In short, I posit BOTH our chains of surveillance (technological traps of visibility), AND our so-called means to break these chains (supposed privacy checks) do us equal harm. Think about that -- and “keep on smiling” -- the next time you enter a public toilet. And ask yourself as you squat, “Is privacy real?”
But then I suppose, unbeknownst to most of us, there is so much truly evil surveillance and breaching of privacy going on behind the scenes, little in this video probably even matters anyway, right?

Animal Spirits

Wed, 8 Feb 2012 09:37:11 -0700

(16:00)
Catherine Bell: "Among the many complex subsystems of cosmic exchange that are woven together in the potlatch, one of the most central is human-animal reciprocity. The potlatch dancers perform the mythical events by which a lineage ancestor acquired special titles, powers, and favors, and from a supernatural animal donor, notably the ability to hunt that animal successfully.

In return, the ancestor and the descendants who inherit the title and powers are obligated to perform the rituals in which the supernatural animal is continually reincarnated. The animal flesh is eaten at the potlatch and the skins that are distributed testify to the death of the "form" of the animal and hence the release of its soul for reincarnation. Thus the potlatch publicly witnesses to the fact that the sponsor has inherited key powers that have enabled him to acquire wealth but also to oblige him to sacrifice it.

Likewise, the animal spirit who sacrifices its animal flesh and skin so that the human lineage may live and prosper counts on the sponsored potlatch as a ritual death and funeral that facilitate its reincarnation. The ritual reinvokes the mythic human-divine interdependence, transmits it to new generations, and fulfills the obligations inherent in it."

from: Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions 1997 p:122

... Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Mahalo’s Dangerous Hunts together in one montage? Why? In order, to both rend and render how our digital representations (of animals, et al.) exclude one essential ingredient: instilled spirit, or put another way, distance and aura.
For the sin of our image making extends here, in vulgar reproducibility and disposability -- not in each image’s newness, ubiquity, profitability, interpretability, or even in their two and three dimensional fidelity and uniqueness. Our images are created already dead -- already sucked of expectation. This holds true for most every image created throughout our digital culture today.
Our technological visualizations are but graven images incapable of surviving physical death, non-reciprocal apparitions ascribing physicality to God yet unworthy to facilitate reincarnation. Today, our disposable digital images are false idols: Golden Calves. And as a consequence of our vulgar image tools and our sinful image making, we idolaters are likewise dead, our ancestors forsaken and our descendants doomed.

...where animism once spiritualized objects,   industrialized technologies objectify all spirit.

Watch Me Do Me

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:26:25 -0700

(12:00)
Susan Linn: “The children I see for therapy have neither guns nor swords nor media-linked action figures when we play together. Nevertheless, they frequently and enthusiastically commit terrible acts of fantasy violence. My puppets are routinely eaten, poisoned, starved, and abandoned. These violent or cruel-seeming fantasies emerge, however, from the children themselves, from their own needs and experiences. Fantasy play is a natural and constructive way for children not only to express their feelings but also to gain a sense of control over an often confusing and frightening world.

“...child development specialists who have written extensively about children and violence, argue that the impetus for healthy adaptive war play -- or any kind of play with scary and/or violent themes -- should come from children themselves and not from the toys we give them or the media to which they are exposed.

“Children listening to fairy tales are free to imagine, in however much detail they choose, the horror of a monster or a violent death. Visual images, on the other hand, are much, much more powerful. Besides, the bloody scenes washing over children in countless movies, videos, and television programs are not of their own making -- they are someone else’s vision and cannot be controlled.”

from: Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood 2004 p:106-108

...I’ve met with Susan Linn in her office at Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston to personally discuss her work, and mine. She is fighting the ‘good fight’. But in the few short years since our 2004 meeting, children, play, imagination, indeed most all of real-life is now eagerly crushed into (self?) constructed visual imagery. And when every playful fantasy (or truth) in life becomes not merely an image but an objectified presentation -- that is to say, flattened into performances of ‘thingness’ -- human objection is rendered into irrelevance. Hence we discover a world today with too little difference (distance:aura) between humanness, fantasy, representation, object, screen image, the quotidian, and the sacred.
‘Thingness’ value increases as our old real devalues to something less than its image. And so, I contend that growing concerns of violence, sexual perversion, celebrity worship, obesity, school drop-out rates, hypertension, etc., are not primarily caused by “the media”. For these are but tangential symptoms of a darker nightmare... that being our growing appetite for the nonchalant objectification of all we see and know... willful objectification without consequence. It’s not that we humans are any more fucked up, or are being fucked over more than ever before. Rather, it is that something still darker happens when, through technological reality, we so eagerly turn ourselves into “thingness”, which in turn begs us towards our own complete continuous consumption.
If you find any of the images in this video troubling, you too are most likely still viewing media through Susan Linn’s lens and fighting the ‘good fight’: seeing symptoms and effects instead of seeing first-hand. I posit most youth would find little ‘wrong’ in this video montage. In fact I’ll wager most youth will find this video funny, clever, cool, weird. After all, the camera equally infantilizes everything before and behind the lens... which, measured by today’s technological lust-logic, includes most everything.
This educated and exhausted ‘good fight’ of exposing objectionable media practices has been reduced to a educational parlour game. It has gotten us nowhere. And now it is simply too late. The seduction of technological imaging and imagining is complete... we have all become both puppets and puppeteers to our ubiquitous imaging technologies; and we love play-acting amongst all this ‘thingness’. We prefer it, we embrace it, we consume it, and we produce it. After all, pornography is not the sexual act... rather, it is the illustration -- the thingness -- of the sexual act. And here, at least in this video, the pathway to thingness proceeds something along these lines:
Act +camera +computer +internet +YouTube +computer +CNN
+TV +computer +internet = totalizing objectification.

And so, ours is a problem well beyond ‘good fight’ complaints of “the media” consuming kids. Kids are being consumed exactly as we adults have always been consumed. The nightmare is that today all of reality, offending and otherwise, must now be consummated with camera/screen representation: that final fulfilling gesture of totalizing objectification. “Watch me do me” because sex (or violence, or life) with another human is no longer any different than sex acts with an object or its technological image, since all are graven representations no longer carrying real consequence. The nightmare lesson camera/screen life is teaching us: What is there to truly care about when all of actuality is bested through perfecting manipulation?
The clips I’ve collected in this video are not “someone else’s vision” as Susan Linn would submit -- rather, they are visions of our collective creation --- technological visions which we can control if we choose to do so. Only we never do, even though we collectively maintain some things must desperately remain sacred. This is the “hostile takeover” of personhood... not simply childhood. And respectfully in 2012, eight years on, it is intellectually naive to still think otherwise. I hope Linn agrees.

Note: If you think the camera/screen/thingness premise of this visual essay is silly, abstract, fear-mongering, or intellectual puffery, consider THIS or THIS.

Persistence of Vision

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:44:23 -0700

(3:30)
“During the late 1820‘s the Belgium scientist Joseph Plateau also conducted a wide range of experiments with afterimages, some of which cost him his eyesight due to staring directly into the sun for extended periods. By 1828 he had worked with a Newton color wheel, demonstrating that the duration and quality of retinal afterimages varied with the intensity, color, time, and direction of stimulus. He also made a calculation of the average time that such sensations lasted -- about a third of a second. What is more, his research seemed to confirm the earlier speculations of Goethe and others that retinal afterimages do not simply dissipate uniformly, but go through a number of positive and negative states before vanishing. He made one of the most influential formulations of theory of ‘persistence of vision’:

‘If several objects which differ sequentially in terms of
form and position are presented one after the other to
the eye in very brief intervals and sufficiently close
together, the impressions they produce on the retina
will blend together without confusion and one will
believe that a single object is gradually changing form
and position.’ “

from: Jonathan Crary Techniques of the Observer 1996 p:107-109

... and I posit:
Whenever forms of media are presented to the eye over
extended periods of time, regardless of interval
sequencing, the impressions in the body and brain will
blend together without confusion and one will believe
that medium is gradually changing form and position. In
short, digital-visual production is itself a kind of language
-- an essential contemporary language, which we are
indeed killing with unreflexive ineptitude.

Going Native

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:05:48 -0700

(19:15)
“The Bronislaw Malinowskian ethnographer, unlike his predecessors, is expected to leave the veranda, go out into society and see for himself or herself; but, given the circumstances in which such an ethnography works, cut off from the familiar world, alone and immersed within a strange society, this fieldwork strategy implies something else. For it is not just about observing the world around oneself. It involves learning to ‘see’ in a visionary sense.

“For the radical disruption of context makes possible certain experiences which may transform the fieldworker from a mere enquirer or observer into a ‘seer’.

“The disorientation and confusion that the fieldworker confronts may be harnessed creatively, enabling him or her to grasp with a new clarity the world rendered unfamiliar and unknown.”

Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye 2001 p.53

...but of course, once the ethnographer “comes down from the veranda” we too often find the romantic innocent eye is also deeply jaundiced. After all Malinowski, as just one example, was a junkie, a sex-aholic, and a self-obsessed mommy’s boy, too -- each a jaundiced ‘seer trait’ curiously glossed in Malinowski’s own mind and across Grimshaw’s first 60 pages... indeed, even to BBC:
“Malinowski’s obsessive analysis of himself, combined
with his scientific mind, would make him the man that
could change anthropology.”

Then again, maybe Malinowski’s ‘seer traits’ are indeed necessary to be a good ethnographer? I mean, what better way for knowing your subjects than by fucking a lot of them... right?
Apparently these jaundiced and seldom-mentioned Malinowskian ‘traits’ bear little relevance when bequeathing the mantle of ‘fathership’ within contemporary anthropological ethnography.

Ethnographers in Perspective

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:05:47 -0700

(6:30)
Jean Rouch: “The camera is for me, if you will, what lets me go anywhere, what permits me to follow someone. It is something with which one can live or do things that one couldn’t do if one didn’t have the camera.

“When my friends and I say today we use the ‘contact camera’ or ‘contact lenses,’ it means that we work with wide-angle lenses, so that we can be very close to the people we film. It ends up reducing our action to an adventure that is the most perfect disorder, since we film with wide angles, that is, seeing everything, but reducing ourselves to proximity, that is, without being seen by others.

“We have become invisible by being close and by having an extremely wide angle view, that’s the model of disorder. ...The paradox is that, maybe because I made films, I have never been possessed.”

Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography 2003 p.154-55

... but to believe that a (phone) camera “permits” ethnographic claims to proximity, or abilities to distinguish possession, or that a camera itself (with or without a wide-angle lens) can simply somehow aid or enlighten ethnography is dangerously misguided, maybe even delusional.

Cameras ensure little save typical visual ethnography. For the camera apparatus itself is but one mystical form of possession obfuscating both subject and meaning. As such, our cameras indeed reliably advance a “most perfect disorder” -- for we do become “possessed” by the very essences of their technological ability. Here, the ethnographer’s camera too often behaves little differently. After all, some proverbs ring true in oppositional directions: One deceptive picture is worth 1000 deceptive words.

If the familiar must be made strange again, so too must an ethnographer’s perspective be occasionally SHOCKED into new uncomfortable awarenesses. If only to see our methods, our methodologies, and ourselves anew.

Mark of Cain

Fri, 2 Dec 2011 16:16:58 -0700

(7:45)
“Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ ‘I know not,’ he replied. ‘Am I my brother's keeper?’

Then He said, ‘What have you done? Your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground! So now you are cursed from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood you have shed. If you work the land, it will never again give you its yield. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.’

But Cain answered the Lord, ‘My punishment is too great to bear! Since You are banishing me today from the soil, and I must hide myself from Your presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth, whoever finds me will kill me.’

Then the Lord replied to him, ‘Therefore, whosoever slayeth Cain vengeance will suffer vengeance seven times over.’ And the Lord set a Mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. Then Cain went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

From: The Bible: Genesis 4:9-17

...But what, exactly, is this “Mark upon Cain”? What is this symbol? What should it look like? How will we know it?

And so, I made for myself this unsettling video in an attempt to contemplate a construction of this “mark”. For regardless of Herman Cain’s sexual infidelities, his blackness, his enigmatic smile, or even his narcissistic media messaging; Cain has marked himself, indeed punished himself, through his own media blood-lusting.

Perhaps, even whether or not we can recognize the hand of the Lord, some lasting mark must be evidenced.

UPDATE: 5 July 2012
UPUPDATE: Only a bit later.

Doctor Jazz

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:00:51 -0700

(2:30)
James Elkins (SAIC): “The Doctorate as Readymade? The universities should not worry too much. Even though it was Duchamp, the founding father of conceptual tendencies in art, who launched the whole process of innovation, there will be no ready-made doctorate. The criteria that are currently used in the countries that have introduced a PhD in the arts offer all the necessary guarantees to counter such a scenario (or nightmare in the view of certain administrators).” (p.103)

“My own uncertainty about the concepts or strategies that might replace research and new knowledge is a reflection of how tricky this subject is. Universities have not been set up to think about the confluence of making and studying, understanding and knowledge, practice-led research and research-led practice, writing and seeing.” (p.130)

“It is superficial, I think, to imagine that art practice can be added to an eclectic selection of disciplines composed by the candidate. There are academic pursuits that result from combinations such as anthropology+sociology+linguistics, or art history+archaeology+semiotics, but there is no academic practice that combines creative work with any other discipline.” (p.157)

“But I haven’t seen examples in which the scholarship melts into creative work, or asks to be read as creative work instead of research.” (p.159)

“It seems that the problem of evaluating a creative-art PhD simply cannot be solved unless disciplines give up their shapes and readers step outside their normal interpretive habits: exactly what might make the new degree so interesting, and at the same time ensure it cannot be commensurate with other degrees.” (p.163)
From: Artists with PhD’s 2009

....I think Elkins is right. And since over the last eight years I found no graduate program worthy enough to add its initials behind my name, there will be no PhD in my future, regardless of how far I look. But no worries, I did the course work, confirmed my candidacy, conducted original research and wrote the dissertation... all inside this most insular and logocentric world where, of course, I still knew more about media production practice and its theory than any of my teachers and supervisors. Peer review? And so, what else could I do? I recused myself from the entire rancid PhD process, and flushed its pretension back where it belongs.

Critical media ethnography is more about accomplishment not accolade, right? And so, I now prefer the nobler moniker: “Doctor Jazz”.

“In texts based on the metaphors of montage, quilt making, and jazz improvisation, many things are going on at the same time -- different voices, different perspectives, points of view, angles of vision. Like autoethnographic performance texts, works that use montage simultaneously create and enact moral meaning. They move from the personal to the political, from the local to the historical and cultural. These are dialogical texts. They presume an active audience. They create spaces for give-and-take between reader and writer. They do more than turn the Other into the object of the social science gaze.”

From Norman Denzin: Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry (2003 p.7)

JFK: Conspiracy Theory

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:20:35 -0700

(20:15)
“A team of experts assembled by the Discovery Channel has recreated the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Using modern blood spatter analysis, new artificial human body surrogates, and 3-D computer simulations, the team determined that the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was the most likely origin of the shot that killed the 35th president of the United States.
“The question we were trying to answer is, given the spatter evidence in a vehicle, and knowing an individual was sitting at a particular location, is there something we could use to determine where the shot originated?’ said Steve Schliebe, a blood spatter and trace evidence specialist with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, who was part of the special investigation.
“While blood spatter analysis existed in the 1960s, modern innovations have greatly improved its accuracy and the amount of information that can be gleaned from drops of blood.”
from: MSNBC 2008

...but then again... after 50 years of continuous conspiracy theory interest, maybe the most consistent yet ill-considered conspiracy is the production machinations within news itself, which knowingly take place inside every TV studio and control room every day. Why do so few conspiracists ever investigate this?
If you haven’t already figured it out, the conspiracy I am interested in is the interruptive commercialization, the incessant branding, the invasive ”shock” interviews, the incongruous presentation, and all the “breaking news” urgencies we take for granted in today’s news broadcasting. Of course, this original 1963 broadcast actually had none of the production value I have added here. I do so now, only to contrast and remind again how this tragic event might have looked in 1963 if it were presented with even more of today’s presentational (in)sensibilities splattered across our screens.

Jerry Rape

Sun, 6 Nov 2011 14:45:39 -0700

(9:45)
"Victim 6 recalls being taken into the locker room next to Holuba Hall at Penn State by Jerry Sandusky when he was 11 year old, in 1998. Sandusky picked him up at his home, telling him he was going to be working out. As they were driving to the University, Sandusky put his right hand upon Victim 6's left thigh several times.
“After lifting weights and playing invented games, Sandusky began wrestling with Victim 6, who was much smaller than Sandusky. Then Sandusky said they needed to shower, even though Victim 6 was not sweaty.
“This left the victim feeling awkward and he tried to go shower at a distance, away from Sandusky, who allegedly called him over, saying he had already warmed up a shower for the boy.
“Once in the shower, Sandusky allegedly approached the boy, grabbed him around the waist and said, ‘I'm going to squeeze your guts out.'
Sandusky then continued to lather the boy's back.”
From: Thirty-Third Statewide Investigating Grand Jury

...of course, this heinous crime will have devastating far-reaching implications for many people for many years to come. However, what strikes me hardest is not the crime itself, rather it is the impetus behind the act. What kind of people commit this kind of crime... and why? What could they possibly be thinking? What do they look like? How might I visualize this behavior -- this impetus -- to others who may want to ask these same question, but don’t or can’t?
Indeed, why do we so seldom speak of the motivation and mind-frame of the perpetrator, or of prior behaviors that lead to crimes like these? Is it because the words necessary to conjure the crime must never be publicly spoken? And does this also hold true for images? On the other hand, can words and images even effectively capture the ghastly passions behind crimes like these?
And so, I decided to make a simple, experimental, fictional video in an attempt to see if I could invoke “the dangerous”... “the demons”... “the taboo” inside this missing, unspeakable, primordial back-story.

Nightly Banality

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 16:55:54 -0600

(19:30)
Susan Sontag: “Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war -- thanks to television -- have devolved into a nightly banality. Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb. So runs the familiar diagnosis.

“But what is really being asked for here? That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week? More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography: an ‘ecology of images’? There isn’t going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.”

from: Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003

I agree with Susan Sontag, but agreement is not enough here. For our nightly banality is indeed devolving. And our abilities for compassion and indignation are being stretched. Yet, we have not lost our capacity to react.
Yes, the horrors will never abate, but we can examine and question our exploitive illustration of these horrors, and why we so readily buy and sell (consume and produce) them.
Likewise, Sontag’s notion of an ecology of images, while simplistic, does not necessarily equate to some narrow notion of a ‘Committee of Guardians’. There are still other effective means for reacting to our nightly banalities... and (C)ritical media ethnography is but one method.
“Excruciations of war” do flood our media, but these images are neither inevitable or happenstance. Nor are they necessarily “true”. Our nightly banalities are purposely constructed, conditioned and disseminated by media producers... and so, these banalities must also be purposely (ie., actively not passively) received, rebuffed, and refunctioned by media consumers.
Thus, maybe “what is being asked for here” -- in this video of the media-blood-lust surrounding Muammar Gaddafi’s capture -- is to consider that Death is no longer simply the last final moment, but rather the last possible photograph. With the difference straddling that blurry lust-line between watching and whipping... the watched and the whipped.

Arab Spring

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:22:53 -0600

(7:30)
I want to understand this Arab Spring. Yet as I watch my TV, channel to channel, I see nothing but olive-skinned men with guns. Guns and more guns, shooting in never-ending interchangeable repetition before secret cameras in hidden corners. These seductive TV images ‘represent’ most all I’ve ever been shown of the many uprisings throughout the Middle East... as if there were no better performers to broadcast to me.

How can this be? One answer is that telecasting endless Arab guns is as seductive as telecasting forbidden sex. And seduction is the black-magic elixir in all media content. Endlessly broadcasting Arab guns on-screen is pornographic production, equally pornographic to the deepest, darkest, most sacred and perverse Arab ‘representation’ of all -- Arab Women. Cameras are guns.

And so, this critical montage is a comparison, an allegorical lament, constructed to shame us all: participants, guns, media makers, warriors, cameras, technology, broadcasters and viewers alike. For it is all willful and seductive pornography.

Take your pick, and enjoy.

War Primer

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:41:02 -0600

(40:00)
Bertolt Brecht’s constructions, all told, were attempts to appropriate ‘mendacious straightforward realism’ in popular media for purposes of shock and interruption.

Mechanical aids, writes Brecht, were to be employed “not to help out the spectator but to block him; they prevent his complete empathy, interrupt his being automatically carried away.” And while Brecht was leery of the camera’s Cyclopean gaze, it was clear that montage-effect could achieve ‘critical distance’.

Here, Brecht’s “Chock” effect intended to be more cerebral than visceral -- where fragmentation, the incorporation of documentary media, parody, nudity, musical interlude, among others, conflate to break illusion, deny emotional catharsis, and to instead educate the audience (V-effekt). Passive reception was to be replaced with intellectual co-production.

Read the full project HERE.

Secret Snow

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:55:03 -0700

(25:00)
Conrad Aiken: "Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed -- I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost -- I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter, Speak to them!..." It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window -- but he could not be sure.”

from: Silent Snow, Secret Snow 1934

Read the full project HERE.

Black Bricolage

Fri, 4 Feb 2011 10:41:05 -0700

(31:00)
Our obsessive concern with TV’s baleful displays of commodified images is well known. It is a common lament that too many manufactured images and thoughts are invading our brains; that we have not been prepared for mastering this abundance; that too much pleasure is afforded too many ‘ignorant’; that too much knowledge is thrust into too many feeble minds. What results, proclaims this thinking, is the unleashing of unknown appetites, mendacious images, un-realities.

Of course, this grips many educated elites in terror. Likewise, socio-radical critique often assumes others are incapable of knowing how to see, do not understand the meaning of what we see, do not know how to transform acquired knowledge into activist energy. But there is a flaw in this reasoning, because: WE HAVE BEEN EDUCATED in the art of recognizing the reality behind appearances and the messages concealed in images. Maybe too perfectly educated?

And now we smile knowingly at all the ‘ignorant’ who do see, but can never see all that we can see.

Read the full project HERE.

B Movie

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:08:56 -0600

(15:15)
Bruce Conner made A Movie in 1958 from a variety of found footage. The images in this ‘tribute video’, however, are taken entirely from one History Channel feature program on the “end of days” topic, entitled Seven Signs of the Apocalypse. I watched this docu-excrement in its entirety on my 9” TV. There was little worthwhile in the program. Its image construction, however, uncannily speaks to a classical surrealistic approach during early 1950s-60s montage filmmaking -- ‘found material’ re-combined into expressions of cultural dissensus. And North American TV is always first a mode of dissensus over consensus, so wall-to-wall images like these are, of course, the norm today not the exception.

Once re-combined here however, these appropriated images, sounds (audio unknown) and texts conflate into a powerful, experimental, visual performance -- a performance maybe not unlike Conner’s A Movie. At bottom, however, I do not value either Conner’s film nor my own B Movie, for that matter, to be critical, surreal or particularly ethnographic... at least not the critical experimental ethnography Cultural Farming promotes.

Read the full project HERE.

My Erotic Screen

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 18:26:22 -0600

(26:30)
While watching Saturday Night LIVE on NBC, Shakira was the musical guest. I was struck by her seductive/sexual presentation. Hers was a unique performance, sensuous yet pornographic. Or was it? Don’t I see this same stuff everywhere, every day?

I decided to simply collect other ‘suggestive’ clips over the next few days, during normal home TV viewing hours, in order to compare and contrast. It made for a very quick and easy video to construct. For if nothing else, television is a most erotic screen... as these next three days soon illustrated.

Read the full project HERE.

Laughter

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:10:53 -0600

(5:40)
Mikhail Bakhtin: “Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger its familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.

“Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment – both scientific and artistic – and into the hands of free experimental fantasy. Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.

“This is the zone of maximally familiar and crude contact; laughter means abuse, and abuse could lead to blows. Basically this is uncrowning, that is, the removal of an object from the distanced plane, the destruction of epic distance, an assault on and destruction of the distanced plane in general.”
From: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 1981 p:23-24

.....Bakhtin’s words are wise but they were also written long ago. Our world has changed. For Bakhtin laughter can liberate us from terror. Today, however, we find terror lurking within our expectation, and our need, for incessant laughter. And so, what happens today when laughter commands all that can be said?... when ‘the media’ (and our own communication) cannot stand without an obligatory happy response or happy ending?... when ‘the media’ demands endless reactions to endless punch lines?... when life must always be improved with a :-) ...or a laugh-track?
Well... life begins to look like this: Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart. Where mocking or simply inverting our illusions simply reproduces the same duplicitous logic.

Oh Canada

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:52:13 -0600

(24:14)
In another time and place, one hundred years ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan was born just up the road from here in Edmonton, Alberta. To honour Marshall McLuhan’s centennial celebration (2011), I felt compelled to comment on two of McLuhan’s reoccurring themes: Space and Place.... and to do so auto-ethnographically.

Despite the preponderance of U.S. TV projects in Cultural Farming, I do watch Canadian TV. It too is inescapable, but I rarely comment on it. And so, this video project offered an opportunity to express what I have witnessed over the last five years throughout the Canadian broadcast spectrum. In short, there is very little, if any, difference in media production, content and meaning. Is it because of Canada’s proximity to the U.S.? Is it because similar media technologies “condition” similarly? Is it because U.S. TV is the docent to all global media production? Is it because the medium itself is the primary message? Of course, as McLuhan would posit: it is all of the above.
This video was originally entitled: Of Fire and Electricity. Read the full project HERE.

Seeds of Change

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 14:56:00 -0600

(23:15)
High School Analytical Essay Topics:
“Story analysis is one of the easiest essays to write. With films you can analyze the semiotics and mis-en-scène. That is, how the scenes fit together and the elements that make up each image.

“For example, in classic film noir, shadow was often used across the face of the villains. The Russian director Sergei Eisenstein used an image of rotten food full of worms, then cut to the next shot of workers on a ship. What was he trying to say? Choose a film and analyze it similarly.”

From: eHOw 2011

...this CliffsNotes style advice, above, is of course, the absolute worst (read: easiest) way to teach ‘story analysis’. And it is also why so many of the stories we consume suck so badly that I often taste reflux vomit bubbling up in the back of my throat just thinking about it.

In this video I use “rotten food” in its opposite sense. But what am I trying to say? Seafaring worm-workers eating their ship like food? Yes.

When Pictures Say Ain't

Thu, 9 Sep 2010 20:23:11 -0600

(13:15)
When visual anthropologist Sol Worth declared that “pictures can’t say ain’t”, the year was 1981. Thirty odd years later we’ve taught our pictures to not only say “ain’t”, but we’ve taught them how to speak more perfectly than we, their makers, even understand. But now that our pictures can speak, what are they telling us? If you listen closely, each tells of utter exploitation, regardless of subject or “production value”.

Zoom, Pan, Cut, with soothing voice-over...

When media-makers construct their communications with identical techniques and with identical intention, every media story becomes an indistinguishable lie. Sol Worth’s mentor, Margaret Mead, seemingly knew this much.

But now, our news coverage of horrific events, indeed even heartfelt tragic events happening in our own backyard, is all conveyed with the exact kind of solipsistic pity that leads us to nothing -- except nothingness.

Determined to Deceive

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 17:30:21 -0600

(31:00)
Richard D. Heffner and Neil Postman in a quick-and-easy comparative remix to honor (and extend) the work of Neil Postman who died on 5 October 2003... because our ever-newer technologies and practices continue to deceive.


Postman: “In the early days of our department, we were subjected to a good deal of derision, some gentle and some nasty, about our use of the phrase “media ecology.” I think the objection was that the term was too trendy, but more than that, the term was more comfortable in biology than in social studies and ought to remain there. But from our point of view, we had chosen the right phrase, since we wanted to make people more conscious of the fact that human beings live in two different kinds of environments. One is the natural environment and consists of things like air, trees, rivers, and caterpillars. The other is the media environment, which consists of language, numbers, images, holograms, and all of the other symbols, techniques, and machinery that make us what we are.
    “From the beginning, we were a group of moralists. It was our idea to have an academic department that would focus its attention on the media environment, with a particular interest in understanding how and if our media ecology was making us better or worse. Not everyone thought that this was a good idea—Marshall McLuhan, for one. Although McLuhan had suggested that we start such a department at NYU, he did not have in mind that we ought to interest ourselves in whether or not new media, especially electronic media, would make us better or worse. He reminded me several times of the lines in Stephen Vincent Benét’s long poem John Brown’s Body. At the end of the poem, Benét makes reference to the Industrial Revolution and finishes with these lines:
‘Say neither, it is blessed nor cursed. Say only ‘It is here.’”
From: The Humanism of Media Ecology - June 2000


    ... If you look around Cultural Farming, names like Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht should almost fall off the screen and onto your lap for reasons clearly articulated throughout. But many other “interlocutors” have deeply influenced my work as well. These names run a gamut from Sontag and Denzin to Baudrillard and Rancière. In (visual) anthropology, it’s people like: Jean Rouch, David MacDougall, George Marcus. In TV/media: James Carey, John Fiske, Robert McChesney. In (media/art/production) education: Paulo Freire, William James, Henry Giroux, John Dewey, Robert Stam, James Elkins. In theatre: Robert Edmond Jones, Donald Oenslager, Bel Geddes, Craig and Appia continue to top my list.
    But increasingly, a few longtime academy “whipping posts” like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman have also been influential. Neil was very kind and encouraging to me in the 1990’s. Back then I knew nothing about critical-anything. His writings were extremely accessible, clear, noble, sharp-witted. Today, many in the academy sniff at Postman’s body of work, quick to compartmentalize his oeuvre into a kind of convenient foil of simplistic “technological determinism”. Postman deserves to be re-read, historically, in light of the enormous changes within both media and education today. He has a lot of good, controversial things to say and remains an excellent “entry point” for a practitioner/autodidact like me... because, if noting else, our image-making technologies do, indeed, continue to deceive.

“A technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.”

Making Movies

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:46:36 -0600

(7:20)
As the American Film Institute informs, there are (only) two kinds of answers regarding how to make “good” films: a Technical answer and an Artistic answer. Critical notions of ethics, social impact, or self-reflexivity are nowhere to be found. These critical qualities seemingly never even enter our “film making” conversation.
This remix is not to dump still more righteous criticism onto rampant, youthful, violent image-making; rather it is to better discuss how we make our media -- at all levels from amateur, to professional, to anthropology, to cellphone -- with identical disregard to ethical reflexivity.
Cameras must now be theorized as equivalents to guns. And so I selected this particular “youth” video to further draw the parallel. But it is the AFI organization, in fact all of media production education, which is the centre-focus here. There is simply no curriculum available for learning ethical image making. For instance, try searching the words “ethics, movie making” (or other similar combinations) on YouTube... of the billion videos posted, not a single entry is found regarding how our media PRODUCTION PRACTICES contain deep, fundamental social implications.

Miss Trash

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:24:27 -0600

(7:30)
“While Trump admitted they've received a fair amount of complaints, the positive feedback has been strong as well. His bottom line? Since taking over the Miss USA competition in 2002, the show's success keeps growing and growing. And when asked why, Trump said, ‘The bathing suits got smaller and the heels got higher.’ At least he's honest !

“The photos are definitely more risqué than years past when contestants wore bathing suits or ball gowns. But The Donald isn't apologizing for being a little racy. When asked what the women will wear this Sunday night when the competition airs live on TV, Trump replied, ‘They'll go as far as they can go on network television... which is pretty far!’"

Update - Two years later:
And again... in the end, gender really doesn’t matter at all. We all continue to eagerly reach towards our own exploitation. For this is always the end result of a production/consumption continuum. For when form follows funding, all exploitation (controversy) makes money... because we like to watch.

Update - And another month later:
“Trashy.”

Liminal Thresholds

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:11:32 -0600

(23:15)
What is ‘being human’ between settled and unsettled lands? In simulation, a Virtual Reality designer is encouraged to believe there is nothing ‘outside’ of their virtual environments. Both the design and designer encourage a desire for complete enveloping illusion.
Virtual Reality designers are not encouraged to make distinctions between simulation and what is simulated. And so, the Designer is never encouraged to look reflexively at the artifice they make.
Virtual Reality design simultaneously ‘is’ and ‘is not’. Thus, the Virtual Reality designer’s experience rides upon this celebration of artifice -- upon their expert manipulation of each illusion.
And so, the holy grail of total immersive Virtual Reality design is ultimately either psychotic or hallucinogenic.

“Virtual Reality is electronic acid.”
Timothy Leary

Exotic Bodies

Mon, 5 Apr 2010 20:34:48 -0600

(23:45)
Following Eisenstein (critical montage), Benjamin (critical theory) and Brecht (critical praxis), I examine how absurdist production conditions most content into non-communication... non-communication being the ‘inability for reciprocation’. I attempt here to critically respond to TV/media makers by refunctioning (symbolically exchanging) their own language and technique.

For what I am mostly concerned with today is the profound lack of reflexivity in both professional and social media production because, whether apparent or not, manipulations made during production are expressions of power and therefore political. Much of my work is an attempt to “critically jolt” viewers to an awareness that our compulsory tools and techniques are the originating mouthpiece of unethical media communication.

Here, I offer McLuhan (1968), “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Likewise, I submit that despite growing TV/media proficiencies we continue to neglect how we become both what we behold (consume) and hold (produce).

Climate Change

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:15:18 -0600

(23:30)
Network news weather reporting is, by far, the worst offender of logical visual clarity found on television. Indeed, TV weather graphics obfuscate at every turn; actually becoming an obstacle - a barrier - to comprehension.
In the mediamonger rush to ‘scoop’ every competitor with ever more gewgaw technologies, network weather graphics are rendered utterly senseless.
Solution: Taking a simple walk outside remains our best bet for forecasting. Go do it. Go outside and check the weather for yourself. Go. Do it now. Get up --- go outside.
Or... do we prefer to sit inside and watch WX forecasting in senseless confusion? But wait you already know the answer... and still you continue to watch and laugh. ...right?

See more WX: Hurricane Katrina

Terminal Telephony

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:58:03 -0600

(23:30)
“How to Use a Cell Phone -- Cell phones are very useful in today's time. From flip phones to camera phones, all the way to a phone with music, Internet and a camera. 
Cellular phones are a must for teenagers and adults alike, and it's getting to the point where younger children feel they need them, too. If you're a little behind the times, you can improve and know how to use one when you need to.”
from: WikiHow

Wasted Vastlands

Sun, 7 Mar 2010 19:38:59 -0700

(23:15)
Newton Minow: “When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, and stay there for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe a vast wasteland (of junk).
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. A nd most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Newton Minow to the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961

...but of course network news broadcasters, or for that matter every broadcaster today, always believe that “vast wasteland” refers to others. We all knowingly wink at shabby content, while blinking during our own production practices.
My classical, critical, surreal, media ethnography is often the missing ingredient inside media studies.

Allied Forces

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 09:02:22 -0700

(23:30)
The Futurist Manifesto: “For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that war is anti-aesthetic... We therefore state...War is beautiful because -- thanks to its gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and light tanks -- it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents and fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages, and much more.

...Poets and artists of Futurism, ...remember these principles of an aesthetic of war, that they may illuminate... your struggles for a new poetry and a new sculpture!”

Manifesto for the colonial war in Ethiopia -- F. T. Marinetti 1909

#Nine

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 14:47:02 -0700

(8:30)
Roland Barthes: “November 5th - Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà “I’m here,” a word we used with each other all our lives). The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.

November 9th - Less and less to write, to say, except this (which I can tell no one).

November 11th - Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say, I’ll be back at a specific time, or whom you can call to say (or to whom you can just say), Voilà, I’m home now.

April 3rd - Despair: the word is too theatrical, a part of the language. A stone.

June 15th - Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): no sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.”

From: Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
... upon his mother’s death on 25 October 1977.

Graven Images

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:23:58 -0700

(23:45)
“Beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.
And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.”
Deuteronomy 4:16-19

Stranger Danger

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:20:52 -0700

(23:15)
Neil Postman: “Like many other social artifacts, childhood became obsolete at the same time that it was perceived as a permanent fixture. I choose 1950 because by that year television had become firmly installed in American homes, and it is in television that we have the coming together of the electric and graphic revolutions. It is in television, therefore, that we can see most clearly how and why the historic basis for a dividing line between childhood and adulthood is being unmistakably eroded.

The period in which we live is, of course, the incunabula of television. After the invention of the printing press it took sixty years for printers to arrive at the idea of numbering pages of books. Who knows what the future holds for television? There may be novel and profound uses for it that will be thought by people not yet born. But if we consider broadcast commercial television as we presently know know it, we can see in it, quite clearly, a paradigm of an emerging social structure that must ‘disappear’ childhood.”

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood 1982 p.75

Our Aural Eye

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:17:45 -0700

(23:20)
Our Visual Ear? With vision there are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of blindness. First, there is blindness due to damage or disruption of our bodily, sensitive apparatus. Second, blindness is due to a person’s inability to integrate sensory stimulation with patterns of movement, sound, and thought... this is a kind of experiential blindness.
To see is not just to have visual sensations, it is to have visual sensations that are integrated, in the right sort of way, with bodily skills and critical awareness. Much of human blindness, as with deafness, results from disjunctions of integration.
Integrating perception with our entire body is crucial for cognition, thought, action... but also within commodity creation. For once our commodities become truly sensorily integrated, cognitive control is achieved... and control is the ultimate logic embedded in every media technology. Hence, once our technologies master human sensorial integration, which is the holy grail of all technological innovation, we shall never be left to our own senses again.

FOX Nation

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:53:36 -0600

(1:45)
Would Jean Baudrillard find North American cable TV news obscene? Of course, as it should be to you and me.  For the ob-scene is not an ethically-loaded term of judgement over the morality of particular images. Rather, the prefix ob refers to the idea of hindering or being against.
The ob-scene, therefore expresses the collapse of distance (aura) in our socio-cultural experiences. Indeed, today there is no longer any social scene or stage of action that we view from a distance. This intimacy of hyper-closeness is the very promise of TV, and particularly for news.
This collapse of distance has occurred across society to such an extent that sexual pornography is but only one extreme example of a wider atmosphere of social explicitness -- social pornography -- which I define as the widespread cultural manifestation of excessively explicit images... not necessarily of a sexual nature.
‘Scenes’ of intimacy and reverence that were once traditionally viewed upon a ‘stage’ or alter necessitated a gap between the viewer and the actor (for instance, the proscenium arch). But now all distance has imploded. As Walter Benjamin reminds, aura is lost.
However, the primary task of all media and information today is to produce the real... the extra real... ever closer... and to ever wider audiences. Media telescopes, it zooms into the real, making it hyper-real.
Visual media production today promotes too much of this real (as it often does -- from anthropological film to FOX News). As it does, we along with our representations fall ever deeper into obscenity and thus pornography. That is to say, visual explicitness demands a kind of zoom-in technique, taking us too near the real, and pornographying realities which previously only came into view through reflective distances.
Today, North American cable TV news propagates the excessively explicit desire to see everything in close-up under the formal surfaces of cultural forms... not to mention the ever-higher resolution (definition) of our screen images throughout every technology. These visual close-ups transgress our social much too pruriently, reproducing it obscenely, obliterating Barthes’ studium, and leaving surreal totalities of punctum in their wake.

The above video is simple intellectual (Eisenstein) montage. It is the explicit closeness of female genitals layered over (collided with) the false, crass promotion of FOX News, in order to call out, identify, and counter today’s obscene lack of distance (newscasting).
               Porn and News - Cameras and Guns.
The telescope on the rifle kills as surely as any bullet.
Allow me to state this case again: The telescope (from vaginal close-ups to earnest newscaster lies into the zoom) on the rifle (photo camera, TV image) kills (objectifies obscenely) as surely as any bullet (message, content). Whichever TV broadcaster or brand of righteousness you prefer; the ideology and method of close-ups conflate both the surreal and obscene, as exaggerated above.   And also here.
                            Aura can be regained.
Here is a likewise approach, a reversed version: Abhort. This video attempts to ”shock” into view the equivalency of the (angry?) news-close-up to the collapse of social distance often found in explicit (pornographic?) media... both are unacceptable practices for public information dissemination.

Taylor, P. A., & Harris, J. LI. (2008). Critical theories of mass media: Then and now. New York: Open University Press (p:169).

Extensions of McLuhan

Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:31:34 -0600

(54:30)
Marshall McLuhan, for me, is always black and white -- not color -- in both message and medium. While color TV technologies had been available well before this period, it was only during the late 60’s and early 70’s that color TV gained household currency.

And experimental video was also making equally strong impressions in art worlds. Thus when considering how to attempt an ethnographic visualization of McLuhan’s 1968 vinyl audio album, The Medium is the Massage, I made several decisions based upon McLuhan’s perspective.

Read the full project HERE.

Digital Natives

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:13:15 -0700

(7:00)
Why, exactly, are we disseminating new technologies like the $100 laptop into today’s racial-economic-global-digital-divide? How, exactly, do we expect any digital liberation in education or identity construction to flourish when contemporary mediamongering re-enforces endlessly similar, confounding tales of racial overtone?
Irrespective of race, however, the term “Digital Native” is cross-purposed... maybe even dangerous... for explaining any new breed of student. This is true particularly since most students today glean their everyday communicational “education” through longitudinal immersions into TV/media’s ever-expanding production practices. In short, our mediated world is a 24/7 docent, and we learn best by watching it and listening to it.
So go ahead... give students in poor or developing nations free computers. I think it could be beneficial. But think twice before including portals for global internet access. Why? Because every media technology educates, in more ways than one, whether intended or not. And so we should clean up our own house-of-images before we seduce others to live in it. Because they will want to visit, indeed even live inside our media “house of visual seductions.” There are few alternatives.
“Computers for children”, as conflated in Negroponte’s rhetoric, means little more than seductively infecting other cultures via our own visual, ideological delivery systems. Cultural Farming’s brand of reflexive response, through appropriation and remix, can help to both inform and reform TV/media “representation” by identifying and “exchanging” these exploitive, unchecked production practices.

Seduction/Complicity

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:40:24 -0600

(8:40)
Jean Baudrillard: “What is seduction?
What is it to be seduced... visually?
It is not to be outwitted, or deceived, or overpowered
by the screen image.

There has to be complicity.

One does not seduce alone.
It is always a question of two;
of the dual and the duel.
Never a simple matter of domination;
whatever the seducer may think.

Doesn’t the seducer end up losing herself in the strategy?
As in an emotional labyrinth?
Doesn’t she invent that strategy in order to lose herself in it?

And she who believes herself the game’s master;
isn’t she the first victim of strategy's tragic myth?”

Black Arts

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:21:05 -0600

(3:00)
The same questions Bill Cosby asked in the 1960’s remain today: What can be surmised when our re-presentations turn ugly?
How humans visualize themselves has long been studied within every branch of the humanities. From self-portrait cave paintings, to the printing press, to today’s cell phone pics; we humans are in constant modes of self-representation.
However, questions remain:
- As our technological tools of self-representation change - will we change with them?
- Will humans see themselves differently with each evolutionary advance in visual technology?
- Will our mental pictures of ourselves, and of those around us, change when we can so easily RE-present ourselves to the world in every manner conceivable - and to a global audience?
As we make our tools - do our tools make us? As we use our tools - do our tools use us?
Demon Face is everywhere.

Leave Britney Alone

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:19:09 -0600

(6:15)
Ethnographic film has faltered around healthy debates of reflexivity. When, how, and how much should the filmmaker rightfully position themselves inside their constructions before crossing into narcissism?

(Rina Sherman, repeatedly shown stalking the elusive ‘best’ camera shot, appears to be a leading protagonist in her own promotional clips.)

Today however, an equally large question should trouble visual anthro-socio-cultural studies: Why must we photograph everything? When is enough images? Why must we, whether we are invited to or not, continually record the most precious, private, intimate moments of others... in explicit close-up? My deep personal struggle with image “taking” begins here. So, I have now put my camera away for good... preferring instead to montage existing content into theoretical responses instead... into dangerous forms of experimental potlatch, to help counter the fallacious black magic of documentary.

Cameras must be theorized as guns today... for better and for worse... which, in itself should pose serious ethical dilemmas when using film or video to ‘capture and interpret’ other cultures.

Read the full project: HERE

Zapook of the North

Tue, 6 May 2008 13:09:32 -0600

(8:40)
In 1922, Robert J. Flaherty launched into household/academic celebrity a new documentary film: Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic y. However, much of his film was staged, rehearsed, and edited for effect. This of course continues routinely today in documentary filmmaking. But importantly, even where contemporary anthropology filmmakers make concerted efforts to capture life as is on film, it is the camera and its imaging techniques that speak, before the anthropologist or her subjects. Curiously, even our most influential (surreal?) anthropologists sometimes willfully deny a camera’s power. Fifty years after Nanook (and 40 years before Zapook), our continuing failures to capture ‘reality’ were certainly never lost on Frank Zappa.

Many others have spoofed Nanook or themselves on YouTube. I have collected some of these mediations here to build a montage chorus to which Zappa is again our logically absurd conductor.

Read the original project HERE... and its original audience HERE.

Word Made Flesh

Wed, 2 Apr 2008 13:59:52 -0600

(3:45)
What happens to our bodies in a world filled with virtual image perfection? Here, I try to visualize this question by appropriating some of the growing genre of “belly punching” videos on the internet and confounding it with typical, experimental 3D animation modeling... and then mixing this all to the music of artist Khia... in hopes of ‘pushing for reversal and collapse’.

In a world filled with extreme desire, ultra competitive, virtual-human representation, do we hurt ourselves in order to reconnect to true bodily sensation? Are our bodies reacting to the unattainable realities of image manipulation, or is self-injury and attention-seeking two sides of the same male-media-image coin? Why do we like to hurt ourselves... and then publicly show it to the world?

GMOx

Wed, 5 Mar 2008 22:23:21 -0700

(10:00)
Transnational corporations are heavily regulated, openly scrutinized, sharply criticized, Yet this kind of discussion rarely extends to the manufacture, distribution and consumption of images fed everyday to a viewing-public by transnational mediamongers. (After which, once consumed, we oddly reply in-kind by remaking our images in their image.)
And so, this video is a rough attempt to connect disparate realities. For most every media image is manipulated -- enabled by still other transnational corporations that provide the ‘seeds, tools and chemical additives for the daily cultivation of highly toxic pictures. Left unchecked, will we find all of media a visual wasteland of industrialized, mutated growth? Do we need ingredient labelling for images, as we desperately do for all our food?
Elsewhere, and in parallel, there is also a growing genre of female breast manipulation on the internet. These grotesquely surreal, essentially genetically-modified images re-present the human body into phantasmagoria. Why? To test if maybe these images taste as irresistibly as our junk-food?
I have interspersed these manufactured images with excerpts from the excellent documentary, Our Daily Bread, in hopes we may pause to consider all our image consumptive realities.

Goddess

Mon, 3 Mar 2008 22:18:55 -0700

(9:30)
This video is a re-consideration of Donna Haraway’s dogs (companion species) -- in combination with cyber dolls -- in order to do my work. (But as Haraway writes, “Bitches that run fast and bite hard are not surrogates for theory.”) And even though I spent all my childhood in dog kennel husbandry, for my money a goddess remains, at least in terms of contemporary visuality, merely a surrealistic construct. Cyborgs, however, are dangerously and tangibly hyperreal -- as is television today.
Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking work in this area was vital. But today, ‘cyborgs’ interpellate at every turn, making it equally vital to challenge Haraway’s contradicting “surrogacy”, and to re-represent its illogical conclusion. For we stand at the precipice of our own narrowing uncanny valley.